Nowrūz, نوروز,"New Day", originally "New Light" is a traditional ancient Iranian New Year. Nowruz is also widely referred to as the Persian New Year.festival which celebrates the start of the Nowruz is celebrated and observed by Iranian people and the related cultural continent and has spread in many other parts of the world, including parts of Central Asia, South Asia and Northwestern China. Also some ethnic groups in Albania, Serbia, Bosnia and the Republic of Macedonia. Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in Iranian calender.
It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox, which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst the Zoroastrian ancestors of modern Iranians, the same time is celebrated in the Indian sub-continent as the new year. The moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year and Iranian families gather together to observe the rituals.
As it was stated before, the first day on the Iranian calender falls on the March equinox, the first day of spring. At the time of the equinox, the sun is observed to be directly over the equator, and the north and south poles of the Earth lie along the solar terminator; sunlight is evenly divided between the north and south hemispheres. Circa the 11 century, major reforms of Iranian calenders took place and whose principal purpose was to fix the beginning of the calendar year, i.e. Nowrūz, at the vernal equinox. Accordingly, the definition of Nowruz given by the Iranian scientist, Tusi, was the following: "the first day of the official new year [Nowruz] was always the day on which the sun entered Aries before noon".
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